Decentralized markets attract large amounts of trade volume, even though they exhibit frictions absent in centralized exchanges. We develop a model with asymmetric information and expertise acquisition where some traders try to exploit any market structure to inefficiently screen their...

We characterize equity return volatility connectedness in the network of major American and European financial institutions, 2004-2014. Our methods enable precise characterization of the timing and evolution of key aspects of the financial crisis. First, we find that during 2007-2008 the...

We consider a fundamental dynamic allocation problem motivated by the problem of securities lending in financial markets, the mechanism underlying the short selling of stocks. A lender would like to distribute a finite number of identical copies of some scarce resource to n clients, each of whom...

Students of poor families invest much less than rich families in college education. To assess the role of financing constraints and subsidy schemes in explaining this gap, I structurally estimate an IO/finance model of college choice in the presence of financing frictions. The estimation uses...

The financial crisis saw a large premium paid for Treasury notes over bonds, reaching six percent of face value. We relate this premium to the underlying sources of liquidity supply and demand. On the supply side, we find that arbitrageurs faced low direct costs but high frictions, and that the...

I develop an analytically tractable dynamic asset pricing model to study expected returns of financially distressed firms in the presence of learning about firm fundamentals and endogenous information acquisition by active investors.The model reveals that learning and information acquisition...

We investigate whether providers of high frequency media analytics affect the stock market. This question is difficult to answer as the response to news analytics usually cannot be distinguished from the reaction to the news itself. We exploit a unique experiment based on differences in news...

Using a novel dataset of accounting and market information that spans most publicly traded firms over the last century, we show that government deficit financing crowds out nonfinancial corporate debt financing and investment. Specifically, an increase in the supply of treasury debt is...

In the recent recession and current economic recovery, policymakers have supported asset prices in the U.S. treasury and mortgage markets, expecting that improvement in the balance sheet of banks will lead to more commercial lending. In general, we document that increases in housing prices in a...

We propose a parsimonious model of over-the-counter trading with asymmetric information to rationalize the existence of intermediation chains that stand between buyers and sellers of assets. Trading an asset through several heterogeneously informed intermediaries can preserve the efficiency of...